


On Borrowed Time

by sakamoon (Sakamoon)



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Should I tag this as major character death?, Temporary Character Death, and also him dying doesn't explicitly happen?, from Connor's point of view, gross misuse of punctuation, incredibly rambly, it's the highway scene, oh...uh, we all know he doesn't stay dead...
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-03
Updated: 2019-04-03
Packaged: 2020-01-04 04:48:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18336494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sakamoon/pseuds/sakamoon
Summary: It shouldn’t have been a problem. Autonomous cars were designed to avoid any large physical objects in the road.Perhaps cars could become deviant too. Connor considered this as yet another car almost hit him, the side mirror maliciously catching his jacket and pulling him right into oncoming traffic.Connor attempted to cross the highway to capture Kara, failed, and got hit by a truck. It all happened much too fast for anyone to do anything about it, but that didn't mean Connor didn't have time to ponder the general unfairness of it all.





	On Borrowed Time

**Author's Note:**

> Not beta'ed. RIP.

              It shouldn’t have been a problem. Autonomous cars were designed to avoid any large physical objects in the road. Their meshed Wi-Fi should have alerted any nearby cars of unexpected actions before they were taken. Of course, a human would worry about crossing eight lanes of high speed traffic, but it was 2038: that worry was unwarranted. Connor pushed past the Lieutenant’s command for him to stay back because all told, crossing the highway should have been as simple as crossing at any normal crosswalk. The cars should have stopped or circumnavigated as necessary.

              Now--his targets escaping as Connor got clipped by yet another car--he couldn’t help but wonder what went so wrong. Perhaps there were an unusual number of manual drivers today, or perhaps traffic was congested enough that the cars’ autonomous decision-making capacities decided that the destruction of a single android wasn’t worth the potential risk to the vehicles’ riders.

              Or perhaps cars could become deviant too. Connor considered this as yet another car hit him, the side mirror maliciously catching his jacket and pulling him right into the center of a lane.

              A lane where a semi was en route to introduce Connor to the tar intimately.

              Connor was able to process incoming data by the trillions of bits every second, but his physical body was not nearly so capable. So, Connor saw the truck coming, took in the driver—who was, in fact, driving manually—not quite paying attention to the road, eating a sandwich and slapping his radio. He took in the truck’s velocity, size, and distance and calculated several different values for the impact force dependent on the unknown variable of the weight of the truck’s cargo. Because he had the time, he also preconstructed the illogical scenario of standing and stopping the truck with one arm, the way androids in pop-culture often did. The process was impossible and unprompted. He tagged it as a software instability. He watched the truck inch closer while he calculated the impossible-to-gather force he would need to stop his fall.

              A single second—only a second, _already a second_ \-- for all these outputs. All these thoughts. The truck inched ever closer, and Connor considered Lieutenant Anderson, watching from behind the fence. Connor didn’t have the time to turn his head, but he had time to think.

              It didn’t take much extrapolation to know that his relationship with the Lieutenant was going to suffer after this. He’d disobeyed his partner, and now, as a direct consequence, he was going to be destroyed. His memories, currently being uploaded to Cyberlife servers in the background, would be downloaded into the next iteration of his model to resume the case flawlessly, but Hank had not responded well last time he was destroyed. Hank had a bad habit of anthropomorphizing Connor. So, while Connor’s destruction was unfortunate for myriad reason, Hank would feel as such for all the wrong ones.

              Then there was the matter of the Lieutenant’s son. Cole Anderson’s life and death were public record. Connor hadn’t had to dig deep to find the underlying cause of the Lieutenant’s dislike of androids. An unfortunate accident, an android obeying its protocols, a human doctor _absolutely not_ obeying his own protocols. Once, Connor had considered using this as a means of explaining the importance of their cases. The android had not been in the wrong. If everyone had been acting according to proper procedure, the doctor would have gotten into the surgery, and the child might have had a chance of survival. Deviants were dangerous—both android _and_ human. 

              Connor never did though. Millions of hours of footage pushed into his hard drive--hundreds of gigabytes worth of texts, videos, and scenarios shoved into his RAM--all pointed very adamantly toward the simple fact that one did not use his partner’s dead son as a bargaining chip. Despite the Lieutenant’s obvious belief, Connor was not tactless.

              So now here they were: tactful Connor, reluctant Hank, and oblivious truck driver; Connor wondered if he should try and review his every choice since his inception to calculate the staggeringly low percentage of probability that he would be here now, in this situation, with all this tact and all the driver’s obliviousness, and Hank’s tired, tired eyes burned into his hard drive for the rest of eternity.

              Connor felt the ground as it met with his right shoulder blade. Warnings of his system overheating popped up—he was overclocking his processors to a dangerous degree for this amount of time in a situation as volatile as this moment. His precognition was designed to last for a mere tenth of a second and was ideally performed only in stable, still environments. If Connor had tried to use this ability in any other scenario where he was falling at a lateral negative 36 degree angle at a rate of 11.7 meters per second per second surrounded by high speed autonomous physical objects and something _wasn’t_ about run into him with approximately 36000 to 54000 pounds of force, the heat caused by the extended use of his precognition overclocking would have damaged his CPU’s right into a fatal error system shutdown in a matter of seconds.

              And now Connor supposed he was performing an action that a human might refer to as rambling, but without any calculable way to escape this situation, he could not currently proceed any further with his mission, and so taking this moment to process some of the RAM build-up via loose and quaint observations was well within mission parameters. After all, Connor wasn’t _actually_ slowing down time. He wasn’t _actually_ postponing his own destruction to ponder on the nature of he and his partner’s relationship, or the state of autonomous vehicles, or an android’s relative tactfulness.

              If he had the processing power to observe all of this while waiting for the truck to inch closer, why shouldn’t he? Why would he just let the truck hit him? No, better to think, ample thoughts ambling aimlessly—and oh, Connor’s head just made impact with the ground, scrambling his language processor. A shockwave flit through his body, momentarily resetting his ocular senses. When they came back online, Connor’s vision was filled by one of the truck’s many tires.

              This, Connor thought, was the crux of the problem. It didn’t necessarily hurt to spend his otherwise soon-to-be-shattered processing power on thoughts like these, but it didn’t help either. Perhaps he should have (metaphorically) stepped out of precognition mode half a second ago. Let the truck hit him, get on with his mission.

              Still, the truck inched ever forward, Connor watching, _postponing_. In the end, he really didn’t want to d—

              Impact.

             

Software Instability ^

**Author's Note:**

> RIP in pieces Connor
> 
> I always thought it was strange that the traffic never stopped on the highway scene. If nothing else, you'd think autonomous cars would be programmed to avoid large obstacles at nearly any cost.
> 
> This was going to be part of a larger story, but it acted much better as a purple prose-y sort-of character study.


End file.
